New! Introducing Full Page Test version 2.0 in Pingdom Tools

After more than six million performed tests, we thought it was time to give version 1.0 of our popular Full Page Test in Pingdom Tools a well-earned break. Actually, we’re giving it a full retirement, umbrella drinks and sunny beaches included. But don’t worry, version 2.0 of the Full Page Test is here to save the day! It’s still in beta, a few tweaks remain, but it’s fully functional so don’t hesitate to give it a spin.

This new Full Page Test is still completely free to use. It still helps you profile your website’s performance. But now it’s even better.

When we say it’s better, we really mean it. We’ve rebuilt the Full Page Test from scratch and have worked hard to make this brand new version super useful to you. Although we may be a bit biased – it’s our baby, after all – we think it’s pretty awesome. The ultimate judges will of course be you, our users, but we suspect you’ll agree with us once you’ve tried it out.

Analyze and optimize website performance

The whole point of our Full Page Test tool is to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. With the help of this tool you can identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on. We have tried to make it useful both to experts and novices alike.

In short, we want it to be a free, easy-to-use tool to help webmasters and web developers everywhere optimize the performance of their websites.

Feature Overview

Although there’s even more to it than what we’re presenting here, these are the most important features. If you’re familiar with the previous version of the Full Page Test, you’ll notice that there are tons of new features and improvements.

Examine all parts of a web page

View file sizes, load times, and other details about every single object on a web page (HTML, JavaScript and CSS files, images, etc.). You can sort and filter this list in different ways to identify performance bottlenecks.

Analyze all HTTP requests in detail

View a full breakdown of the different stages of loading each object on a page, such as the time it took to perform the DNS lookup, connect to the web server, wait for a response, download the file, etc. You can even view the server’s response header for each request if you like. This is all very useful for identifying general performance issues, for example slow responses from a web server.

Performance overview and stats

We automatically put together plenty of performance-related statistics for you based on the test result. It’s a quick way for you to pinpoint what slows your site down.

Performance grade and tips

See how your website conforms to performance best practices from Google Page Speed (similar to Yahoo’s Yslow). You can get some great tips on how to speed up your website this way.

Trace your performance history

We save each test for you so you can review it later and also see how things change over time (with pretty charts!). If you for some reason don’t want to save test results, you can turn this off.

Test from multiple locations

See how fast a website loads in Europe, in the United States, etc. We’re launching with a few servers dedicated entirely to the Full Page Test, and will expand that gradually over time to more locations.

Share your results

We’ve made it easy for you to perform a test and share it with your friends, work colleagues or perhaps your web host. You can currently share via Twitter or email, and we will soon add support for sharing via Facebook and Google+.

The cogs and gears behind the scenes

All tests are done with an actual web browser, so they will match the end-user experience exactly. We’re using Google’s popular Chrome web browser (which in turn uses WebKit, just like Apple’s Safari). So, what you see in the test results exactly matches what a web browser loads when it accesses the page you’re testing.

For this to work smoothly for you, we run multiple Chrome sessions on a number of Ubuntu Linux servers (the penguins are happy). We’ve set aside these servers specifically for the Full Page Test, so they don’t have to compete for resources with other applications. Needless to say, they’re behind very fast Internet connections.

If there for some reason is no free “slot” available to you when you try to run a test (if many people are running tests at the same time), you’ll automatically wait in line and the test will start by itself once it’s your turn. Normally you won’t have to wait at all, though. Testing a site with our Full Page Test should be a snappy experience.

We have also integrated Google Page Speed in the test, so you can get a bunch of smart tips on how to make a specific web page faster. These tips are based on established best practices for web performance and give you very specific advice you can follow. Neat, right?

@Vincent: Thanks for the feedback. We’ll have a look at that. What browser are you using? (Please also note that we have a Uservoice widget on the site’s left side which is ideal for this kind of feedback.)

Consider Pingdom

With Pingdom website monitoring you’ll be the first to know when your website is down. Whether you have a big or small website, we offer a range of options that suit you — always with a free 14-day trial.